Original Fire (6 page)

I’m much the worse for wear, it’s double true.

Too many incidents

a man might misconstrue—

my conduct, for a lack of innocence.

I seem to get them crazed or lacking sense

in the first place.

Ancient, solid gents

I sit by on the bus because they’re safe,

get me coming, going, with their canes,

or what is worse,

the spreading stains

across the seat. I recognize at once

just what they’re up to, rustling in their coats.

There was a priest,

the calmer sort,

his cassock flowing down from neck to feet.

We got to talking, and I brushed his knee

by accident,

and dutifully,

he took my hand and put it back

not quite where it belonged; his judgment

was not that exact.

I underwent

a kind of odd conversion from his act.

They do call minds like mine one-track.

One track is all you need

to understand

their loneliness, then bite the hand that feeds

upon you, in a terrible blind grief.

Last night, my dreams were full of Otto’s best friends.

I sat in the kitchen, wiping the heavy silver,

and listened to the losses, tough custom, and fouled accounts

of the family bootlegger, county sheriff:

Rudy J. V. Jacklitch, who sat just beside me,

wiping his wind-cracked hands

with lard smeared on a handkerchief.

Our pekinese-poodle went and darkened his best wool trousers,

and he leapt up, yelling for a knife!

These are the kinds of friends

I had to tend in those days:

great, thick men, devouring

Fleisch, Spaetzle,
the very special

potato salad for which I dice

onions so fine they are invisible.

Rudy J. V. Jacklitch was a bachelor, but he cared

for his mother, a small spider of a woman—all fingers.

She covered everything, from the kettle to the radio,

with a doily. The whole house

dripped with lace, frosting fell

from each surface in fantastic shapes.

When Otto died, old Rudy came by

with a couple jugs for the mourners’ supper.

He stayed on past midnight, every night the month after

he would bring me a little something

to put the night away.

After a short while I knew his purpose.

His glance slipped as the evening

and the strong drink wore on.

Playing cribbage I always won,

a sure sign he was distracted.

I babbled like a talking bird,

never let him say the words

I knew were in him.

Then one night he came by,

already loaded to the gills,

rifle slung in the back window

of his truck:
Going out

to shoot toads.
He was peeved

with me. I’d played him all wrong.

He said his mother
knew just what I was.

The next thing I heard that blurred night

was that Rudy drove his light truck

through the side of a barn,

and that among the living

he stayed long enough

to pronounce my name, like a curse

through the rage and foam of his freed blood.

So I was sure, for a time and a time after,

that Rudy carried

my name down to hell on his tongue

like a black coin.

I would wake, in the deepest of places,

and hear my name called.

My name like a strange new currency they read:

Mary Kröger

with its ring of the authentic

when dropped

or struck between their fingers.

How I feared to have it whispered in their mouths!

Mary Kröger

growing softer and thinner

till it dissolved

like a wafer under all that polishing.

The Widow Jacklitch

All night, all night, the cat wants out again.

I’ve locked her in the kitchen where she tears

From wall to wall. Her bullet head leaves marks;

She swings from tablecloths, dislodges pots.

When Rudy was alive the cat was all

You ever could have wanted in a child, it sat so still

And diligently sucked its whiskers clean. I cram

A doily in my mouth to still the scream.

All night the sweethearts dandle in the weeds.

It’s terrible, the little bleats they make

Outside my window. Girls not out of braids

Walk by. I see their fingers hike their skirts

Way up their legs. I say it’s dirt.

The cat’s got rubbage on her brain

As well. She backs on anything that’s stiff.

I try to keep the pencils out of reach.

That Kröger widow practiced what she’d preach

A mile a minute. If she was a cat

I’d drown her in a tub of boiling fat

And nail her up like suet, out in back

Where birds fly down to take their chance.

I don’t like things with beaks. I don’t

like anything that makes a beating sound.

Beat, beat, all night they hammered at the truck

With bats. But he had locked himself

In stubbornly as when a boy; I’d knock

Until my knuckles scabbed and bled

And blue paint scraped into the wounds. He’d laugh

Behind his door. I’d hear him pant and thrill.

A mother’s hell. But I’d feel the good blindness stalk

Us together. Son and mother world without end forever.

I knew at once, when the lights dimmed.

He was pissing on the works.

The generator fouled a beat

and recovered.

My doors were locked

anyway, and the big white dog

unchained in the yard.

Outside, the wall of hollyhocks

raved for mercy from the wind’s strap.

The valves of the roses opened,

so sheltering his step

with their frayed mouths.

I don’t know how he entered

the dull bitch at my feet.

She rose in a nightmare’s hackles,

glittering, shedding heat

from her mild eyes.

All night we kept watch,

never leaving the white-blue ring

of the kitchen. I could hear him out there,

scratching in the porch hall, cold

and furtive as a cat in winter.

Toward dawn I got the gun.

And he was out there, Rudy J. V. Jacklitch,

the bachelor who drove his light truck

through the side of a barn on my account.

He’d lost flesh. The gray skin of his face dragged.

His clothes were bunched.

He stood reproachful,

in one hand the wooden board

and the pegs, still my crib.

In the other the ruined bouquet

of larkspur I wouldn’t take.

I was calm. This was something I’d foreseen.

After all, he took my name down to hell,

a thin black coin.

Repeatedly, repeatedly, to his destruction,

he called.

And I had not answered then.

And I would not answer now.

The flowers chafed to flames of dust in his hands.

The earth drew the wind in like breath and held on.

But I did not speak

or cry out

until the dawn, until the confounding light.

The night was clean as the bone of a rabbit blown hollow.

I cast my hood of dogskin

away, and my shirt of nettles.

Ten years had been enough. I left my darkened house.

The trick was in living that death to its source.

When it happened, I wandered toward more than I was.

Widowed by men, I married the dark firs,

as if I were walking in sleep toward their arms.

I drank, without fear or desire,

this odd fire.

Now shadows move freely within me as words.

These are eternal, these stunned, loosened verbs.

And I can’t tell you yet

how truly I belong

to the hiss and shift of wind,

these slow, variable mouths

through which, at certain times, I speak in tongues.

I must become small and hide where he cannot reach.

I must become dull and heavy as an iron pot.

I must be tireless as rust and bold as roots

growing through the locks on doors

and crumbling the cinder blocks

of the foundations of his everlasting throne.

I must be strange as pity so he’ll believe me.

I must be terrible and brush my hair so that he finds me attractive.

Perhaps if I invoke Clare, the patron saint of television.

Perhaps if I become the images

passing through the cells of a woman’s brain.

I must be very large and block his sight.

I must be sharp and impetuous as knives.

I must insert myself into the bark of his apple trees,

and cleave the bones of his cows. I must be the marrow

that he drinks into his cloud-wet body.

I must be careful and laugh when he laughs.

I must turn down the covers and guide him in.

I must fashion his children out of Play-Doh, blue, pink, green.

I must pull them from between my legs

and set them before the television.

I must hide my memory in a mustard grain

so that he’ll search for it over time until time is gone.

I must lose myself in the world’s regard and disparagement.

I must remain this person and be no trouble.

None at all. So he’ll forget.

I’ll collect dust out of reach,

a single dish from a set, a flower made of felt,

a tablet the wrong shape to choke on.

I must become essential and file everything

under my own system,

so we can lose him and his proofs and adherents.

I must be a doubter in a city of belief

that hails his signs (the great footprints

long as limousines, the rough print on the wall).

On the pavement where his house begins

fainting women kneel. I’m not among them

although they polish the brass tongues of his lions

with their own tongues

and taste the everlasting life.

1 Baptism

As the sun dancers, in their helmets of sage,

stopped at the sun’s apogee

and stood in the waterless light,

so, after loss, it came to this:

that for each year the being was destroyed,

I was to sacrifice a piece of my flesh.

The keen knife hovered

and the skin flicked in the bowl.

Then the sun, the life that consumes us,

burst into agony.

We began, the wands and the head crowns of sage,

the feathers cocked over our ears.

When the bird joined the circle and called,

we cried back, shrill breath

through the bones in our teeth.

Her wings closed over us, her dark red

claws drew us upward by the scars,

so that we hung by the flesh

as in the moment before birth

when the spirit is quenched

in whole pain, suspended

until there is no choice, the body

slams to earth,

the new life starts.

2 Communion

It is spring. The tiny frogs pull

their strange new bodies out

of the suckholes, the sediment of rust,

and float upward, each in a silver bubble

that breaks on the water’s surface

to one clear unceasing note of need.

Sometimes, when I hear them,

I leave our bed and stumble

among the white shafts of weeds

to the edge of the pond.

I sink to the throat,

and witness the ravenous trill

of the body transformed at last and then consumed

in a rush of music.

Sing to me, sing to me.

I have never been so cold

rising out of sleep.

3 Confirmation

I was twelve, in my body

three eggs were already marked

for the future.

Two golden, one dark.

And the man,

he was selected from other men,

by a blow on the cheek

similar to mine.

That is how we knew,

from the first meeting.

There was no question.

There was the wound.

4 Matrimony

It was frightening, the trees in their rigid postures

using up the sun,

as the earth tilted its essential degree.

Snow covered everything. Its confusing glare

doubled the view

so that I saw you approach

my empty house

not as one man, but as a landscape

repeating along the walls of every room

papering over the cracked grief.

I knew as I stepped into the design,

as I joined the chain of hands,

and let the steeple of fire

be raised above our heads.

We had chosen the costliest pattern,

the strangest, the most enduring.

We were afraid as we stood between the willows,

as we shaped the standard words with our tongues.

Then it was done. The scenery multiplied

around us and we turned.

We stared calmly from the pictures.